Meanness Quotes

1. "But the writer who endures and keeps working will finally know that writing the book was something hard and glorious, for at the desk a writer must try to be free of prejudice, meanness of spirit, pettiness, and hatred; strive to be a better human being than the writer normally is, and to do this through concentration on a single word, and then another, and another. This is splendid work, as worthy and demanding as any, and the will and resilience to do it are good for the writer's soul."
Author: Andre Dubus

2. "Empathy is really the opposite of spiritual meanness. It's the capacity to understand that every war is both won and lost. And that someone else's pain is as meaningful as your own."
Author: Barbara Kingsolver

3. "There is no act of treachery or meanness of which a political party is not capable; for in politics there is no honour."
Author: Benjamin Disraeli

4. "Envy is the religion of the mediocre. It comforts them, it soothes their worries, and finally it rots their souls, allowing them to justify their meanness and their greed until they believe these to be virtues. Such people are convinced that the doors of heaven will be opened only to poor wretches like themselves who go through life without leaving any trace but their threadbare attempts to belittle others and to exclude - and destroy if possible - those who, by the simple fact of their existence, show up their own poorness of spirit, mind, and guts. Blessed be the one at whom the fools bark, because his soul will never belong to them."
Author: Carlos Ruiz Zafón

5. "There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness."
Author: Carol Rifka Brunt

6. "I . . . Why do you want me to?" There was a flicker of something in Greta's look. I couldn't tell whether it was a flicker of love or regret or meanness, and then she said, "Why wouldn't I want you to?" Because you hate me, I thought, but I didn't say it."
Author: Carol Rifka Brunt

7. "Wherever you look there's meanness and corruption. This room, this bottle of grape wine, these fruits in the basket, are all products of profit and loss. A fellow can't live without giving his passive acceptance to meanness. Somebody wears his tail to a frazzle for every mouthful we eat and every stitch we wear—and nobody seems to know. Everybody is blind, dumb, and blunt-headed—stupid and mean."
Author: Carson McCullers

8. "Poetry destroyed? Genius banished? No! Mediocrity, no: do not let envy prompt you to the thought. No; they not only live, but reign, and redeem: and without their divine influence spread everywhere, you would be in hell--the hell of your own meanness."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

9. "….watch me rise like smoke from fire.Watch me fly above your hate.Watch me dance upon your meannesslike a ballerina with posture; grace.Watch me laugh over your hatred;watch me soar above your sea of grief.And know that I am out there somewhere… C R U S H I N G."
Author: Coco J. Ginger

10. "You can find meanness in the least of creatures, but when God made man the devil was at his elbow. A creature that can do anything. Make a machine. And a machine to make the machine. And evil that can run itself a thousand years, no need to tend it."
Author: Cormac McCarthy

11. "It was a story to tell myself, a promise. Saying out loud, "You're never going to touch me again" - that was a piece of magic, magic in the belly, the domed kingdom of sex, the terror place inside where rage and power live. Whiskey rush without whiskey, bravado and determination, this place where for the first time I knew no confusion, only outrage and pride. In the worst moments of my life, I have told myself that story, the story about a girl who stood up to a monster. Doing that, I make a piece of magic inside myself, magic to use against the meanness of the world."
Author: Dorothy Allison

12. "Like the minor poet who knows the meanness of his gift, I am doomed to a lifetime of frustration: to be able to comprehend beauty, but not create it."
Author: Elizabeth Bear

13. "Of all faults the one she most despised in others was the want of bravery; the meanness of heart which leads to untruth."
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

14. "The meanest thing to which we bid adieu, Loses its meanness in the parting hour."
Author: Elizabeth Gaskell

15. "Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead," The Misfit continued, "and He shouldn't have done it. He shown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it's nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn't, then it's nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness," he said and his voice had become almost a snarl."
Author: Flannery O'Connor

16. "The small meannesses bred by the law of competition corrode men's character as rust spoils steel."
Author: Frances E. Willard

17. "Maybe after all it's a good thing to tell people about their meanness and give them a stirring up once in a while."
Author: Gene Stratton Porter

18. "Guard well within yourself that treasure, kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness."
Author: George Sand

19. "I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it."
Author: Gillian Flynn

20. "I am, I guess, depressed. I guess I've been depressed for about twenty-four years. I can feel a better version of me somewhere in there - hidden behind a liver or attached to a bit of spleen within my stunted, childish body - a Libby that's telling me to get up, do something, grow up, move on. But the meanness usually wins out. (2)"
Author: Gillian Flynn

21. "Nobody here could ever talk about a heaven on earth. Heaven remained rigidly in its proper place on the other side of death, and on this side flourished the injustices, the cruelties, the meanness that elsewhere people so cleverly hushed up. Here you could love human beings nearly as God loved them, knowing the worst: you didn't love a pose, a pretty dress, a sentiment artfully assumed."
Author: Graham Greene

22. "A woman, if she hates her husband (and many of them do), can make life so sour and obnoxious to him that even death upon the gallows seems sweet by comparison. This hatred, of course, is often, and perhaps almost invariably, quite justified. To be the wife of an ordinary man, indeed, is an experience that must be very hard to bear. The hollowness and vanity of the fellow, his petty meanness and stupidity, his puling sentimentality and credulity, his bombastic air of a cock on a dunghill, his anaesthesia to all whispers and summonings of the spirit, above all, his loathsome clumsiness in amour—all these things must revolt any woman above the lowest."
Author: H.L. Mencken

23. "The avoidance of little evils, little sins, little inconsistencies, little weaknesses, little follies, little indiscretions and imprudences, little foibles, little indulgences of self and of the flesh, little acts of indolence or indecision, or slovenliness or cowardice, little equivocations or aberrations from high integrity, little touches of shabbiness or meanness...little indifferences to the feelings or wishes of others, little outbreaks of temper, or crossness, or selfishness, or vanity - the avoidance of such little things as these goes far to make up at least the negative beauty of a holy life."
Author: Horatius Bonar

24. "You've got to know what your 'thing' is, and you've got to call it a 'thing,' whether it's meanness, nastiness, un-forgiveness, arrogance, ego, resistance, rebelliousness or defiance. Everybody's got a 'thing,' and once you call your 'thing' a 'thing,' we can give it a place to be or dismiss it."
Author: Iyanla Vanzant

25. "Like the Earth, the Web is a less appealing place than it used to be. If I want attitude and arguing and meanness and profanity and wrong information screamed at me as gospel, I'll get in a time machine and spend Christmas with my family in 1977."
Author: J. R. Moehringer

26. "Oh, make no mistake. I am no callow, ardent youth. I am an elderly man, broken in health and body, and soon to die. I am a scientist and a philosopher. I, as all the generations of philosophers before me, know woman for what she is—her weaknesses and meannesses and immodesties and ignobilities, her earth-bound feet and her eyes that have never seen the stars. But—and the everlasting, irrefragable fact remains: Her feet are beautiful, her eyes are beautiful, her arms and breasts are paradise, her charm is potent beyond all charm that has ever dazzled man; and, as the pole willy nilly draws the needle, just so, willy nilly, does she draw man."
Author: Jack London

27. "Conner thought he understood how pride could back up in somebody, get turned around and come out as meanness. But that didn't make it any easier to put up with."
Author: Jean Thompson

28. "Perhaps Effie Mumford was only trying to prove something she already knew: that, like all animals, she was at the whim of the general disorder and unimaginative meanness of the world surrounding her."
Author: Joe Meno

29. "It should be your care, therefore, and mine, to elevate the minds of our children and exalt their courage; to accelerate and animate their industry and activity; to excite in them an habitual contempt of meanness, abhorrence of injustice and inhumanity, and an ambition to excel in every capacity, faculty, and virtue. If we suffer their minds to grovel and creep in infancy, they will grovel all their lives."
Author: John Adams

30. "It has always seemed strange to me... the things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling, are the concomitants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest, are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second."
Author: John Steinbeck

31. "The things we admire in men, kindness and generosity, openness, honesty, understanding and feeling are the concomiants of failure in our system. And those traits we detest, sharpness, greed, acquisitiveness, meanness, egotism and self-interest are the traits of success. And while men admire the quality of the first they love the produce of the second. (Cannery Row)"
Author: John Steinbeck

32. "Only once or twice in her life had she ever understood all of him, but the part of him which she knew, she knew intricately and well. No little appetite or pain, no carelessness or meanness in him escaped her; no thought or dream or longing in him ever reached her. And yet several times in her life she had seen the stars."
Author: John Steinbeck

33. "She empathized with those who were true victims but, in her own case, she rejected victimhood. The details of life and the amusement that she took in dwelling on those details, toying with those details, were her weaponry of choice against the many difficulties that she had to face. New York was a bitter place for women of her class and color in those days, but she did not reciprocate that bitterness. She rose above the meanness that surrounded her. She punched holes in that meanness with her cleverness and wit and with her eye for the preposterous. She laughed a lot. She loved her lamb chops and her baked potato. In the details, she transcended."
Author: Jonathan Kozol

34. "She set her hands neatly in her lap. "But you just said he liked you." "No, I said he enjoys my company. That is, he enjoys hating me. Or pretending to hate me. I don't know which. But I'm finding it difficult to completely dislike someone who gets pleasure from having me around. ..."So he likes being mean to you," she said. "And you like that he likes being mean to you." "And I like being mean to him, too, don't forget." "Of course not. Pleasure from meanness. There's a name for it: sadomasochism."
Author: Kristin Walker

35. "Thus it is that dignity finds its (firm) root in its (previous) meanness, and what is lofty finds its stability in the lowness (from which it rises)."
Author: Lao Tzu

36. "Dr. Rhinestein did not test for malice, for spiteful indifference, or for congenital meanness. If they could, I wonder how many fish we might throw back."
Author: Lionel Shriver

37. "Where envy reigns virtue can't exist, and generosity doesn't go with meanness."
Author: Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

38. "The unfailing rhythm of the seasons, the ever-turning wheel of life, the four facets of the earth which are lit in turn by the sun, the passing of life--all these filled me once more with a feeling of oppression. Once more there sounded within me, together with the cranes' cry, the terrible warning that there is only one life for all men, that there is no other, and that all that can be enjoyed must be enjoyed here. In eternity no other chance will be given to us.A mind hearing this pitiless warning--a warning which, at the same time, is so compassionate--would decide to conquer its weakness and meanness, its laziness and vain hopes and cling with all its power to every second which flies away forever.Great examples come to your mind and you see clearly that you are a lost soul, your life is being frittered away on petty pleasures and pains and trifling talk. "Shame! Shame!" you cry, and bite your lips."
Author: Nikos Kazantzakis

39. "Weren't you scared?" I ask."Yes. But it was a good scared.""There's a good kind?""Oh, yes." Her voice drops so low I have to strain to hear. "Orlin made me scared all the time. Scared I would starve. Scared I would get too cold. Scared he would hurt me again or get so mad he'd throw me to one of the men. That was nasty bad scared." She pauses, scuffing her boots against the floor. "But you never hit me, even though I'm your slave... You always feed me. You call me my true name. Now when I'm scared, it's not because of meanness. And today, I chose my own scared. It's always a good scared, when you get to pick it your own self."
Author: Rae Carson

40. "Prayer that craves a particular commodity—anything less than all good, is vicious. Prayer is the contemplation of the facts of life from the highest point of view. It is the soliloquy of a beholding and jubilant soul. It is the spirit of God pronouncing his works good. But prayer as a means to effect a private end is theft and meanness. It supposes dualism and not unity in nature and consciousness. As soon as the man is at one with God, he will not beg."
Author: Ralph Waldo Emerson

41. "But I have come to believe that virtue isn't a condition of character. It's an elected action. Its a choice we keep making over and over hoping that someday we'll create a habit so strong it will carry us through our bouts of pettiness and meanness."
Author: Rhoda Janzen

42. "This being human is a guest house. Every morning is a new arrival. A joy, a depression, a meanness, some momentary awareness comes as an unexpected visitor...Welcome and entertain them all. Treat each guest honorably. The dark thought, the shame, the malice, meet them at the door laughing, and invite them in. Be grateful for whoever comes, because each has been sent as a guide from beyond."
Author: Rumi

43. "These Fatalists preach that Chance and Peril are merely masks for Fate's workings, nothing in themselves, and moreover that all the gods move at Fate's bidding. Their followers take comfort in thinking that their every deed is meant to be; it excuses all manner of meanness."
Author: Sarah Micklem

44. "Ollie though how her daddy once said sometimes people do things out of ignorance more than meanness. That's what Ollie took this woman to be - ignorant of God's love more than mean-spirited towards others."
Author: Tess Hilmo

45. "Boyishness—by which I mean animal life in its fullest measure, good nature and honest impulses, hatred of injustice and meanness, and thoughtlessness enough to sink a three-decker."
Author: Thomas Hughes

46. "When I want to show the kind of meanness people are capable of, to make it believable I find I have to tone it down. It's in real life that people are over the top."
Author: Todd Solondz

47. "There is so much trouble in coming into the world, and so much more, as well as meanness, in going out of it, that 'tis hardly worth while to be here at all."
Author: Viscount Henry

48. "It is very seldom that one encounters what would appear to be sheer unadulterated evil in a human face; an evil, I mean, active, deliberate, deadly, dangerous. Folly, heedlessness, vanity, pride, craft, meanness, stupidity - yes. But even Iagos in this world are few, and devilry is as rare as witchcraft. ("Bad Company")"
Author: Walter De La Mare

49. "I consider nothing low but ignorance, vice, and meanness, characteristics generally found where the animal propensities predominate over the higher sentiments."
Author: William John Wills

50. "Cruelty to dumb animals is one of the distinguishing vices of low and base minds. Wherever it is found, it is a certain mark of ignorance and meanness; a mark which all the external advantages of wealth, splendour, and nobility, cannot obliterate. It is consistent neither with learning nor true civility."
Author: William Jones

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